From: Elizaphanian (elizaphanian@tiscali.co.uk)
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 16:39:35 BST
Hi David,
> dmb says:
> That's right. We only disagree about the nature of Pirsig's 4th level. You
> want to de-Spockify it and I'm saying that this is misguided because Pirsig
> has already done that. Its one of his main points in both ZMM and LILA. From
> the road side motorcycle repair shops of middle America and Ponciare's
> coffeehouse to the conference of physicists at Copenhagen, Pirsig casts even
> cold steele, advanced mathematics and the hard sciences as playgrounds for
> artists. And then there's the MOQ itself, which insists already that "amoral
> scientific materialism" be replaced. The human qualities that Wilber
> describes as features of the higher levels, I think, is quite consistent
> with what Pirsig is saying too. (I posted 8 stages yesterday.) There you'll
> notice that the Spockish kind of intellect is #5, the very first stage after
> the social level has been transcended. The sterotype is not completely
> without foundation, but it only applies to "freshmen" intellectuals and,
> more to the point, does not reflect the MOQ's 4th level accurately. It more
> precisely describes SOM, Pirsig's great white whale.
OK, then this really moves us forward. I completely agree that it is his main point in ZMM; my
disagreement is that I think the presentation in Lila more or less undercuts that which is presented
in ZMM. If you can persuade me that Phaedrus (the character in Lila) is not intended to be
more-or-less Spock-like, and in particular, that Pirsig includes emotional awareness in his
understanding of level 4, then we'll have really got somewhere!
> Sam continued:
> Which would be nice. We can then spend time arguing over whether 'intellect'
> is the best word to
> describe all those things, as opposed to 'eudaimonic' or something else. I
> can't get away from the
> suspicion that you *don't* think that though. Particularly as I'm not sure
> that the first three of
> those things listed actually are fourth level - they seem like the third
> level to me.
>
> dmb says:
> The first three are social level values? You mean ethics, values and morals?
> The idea that these are not invited to the intellectual party is exactly
> Pirsig's criticism of SOM and he says instead that they exist at every level
> of reality. Everything. Even the chair and even the bum of the philosopher
> who sits upon it.
Values exist everywhere, according to the MoQ, and if you take 'morals' to be the same then fine.
But ethics I see as level 3, and as that was the first, I was taking them to be synonyms, and not
MoQ specific terms. I think we do actually agree on that point.....
Sam
"Phaedrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of 'duty toward self' which is an
almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word 'dharma', sometimes described as the 'one' of the
Hindus. Can the 'dharma' of the Hindus and the 'virtue' of the Ancient Greeks be identical?" - The
Eudaimonic MoQ says yes. "Lightning hits!"
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